Citizen or Solider?

I must preface this with a disclaimer:

I am a voluntaryist. The only moral, ethical, true, way for two individuals to deal with each other is by voluntary means. Any act by one to force the other to comply is already an immoral act. Thus, my opinion of violence is that it is always wrong, apart from defending oneself against violence.

It is funny that so much of the old ideas of government have managed to stay inside the current views on government. Well, it's funny only in that so few people see that there is really zero distinction between forms of governments. That in fact, all government is a form of controlling the means of other people's production. That is all, government is by its nature anti-voluntary. Government must act by force. 

In the old days, this was a singular king or a ruler, perhaps a 'wise' counsel of men, forcing what they thought was divine authority on their subjects. They controlled the means of other men's production. In those old days, when one King wanted another Kings means of production and the profit of that production, the King would raise an army and invade the other King's land, hoping to capture or kill the king. This would give the victor the so-called authority over the production of the land, thus, over the people who actually produce. In those days, the subjects, that is the common man, was just that, an irrelevant byproduct of the King. The common man was not targeted as a member of the King's army and in most cases, his lot was that of fate. He was generally ignored because he was tied to the land and his production was no different than a cow in the field producing milk.

Over time the armies themselves came to represent the Nations opinion of political power and the people continued to be thought of as cattle, who should be left out of the conflict. The common man became the victim of the political ideas of his masters. The atrocities of Nazi's, the killings in the Khmer Rouge, slavery, etc. are fair examples of political ideas forcing the common man to suffer at their hands and more importantly, the clear recognition that we common men find such things outrageous. These cruelties wouldn't have been as bad if it had only happened to men in uniforms, because those men, for some reason, have lost their direct relationship to the common men within the confines of the State. The uniform, for most people, means that they can be the victim of violence and it is somehow justifiable.

But that way of looking at common men is wrong and if we're going to save mankind, we need to realize this quickly. We need to see it now because the enemies of Liberty have already figured it out.

The truth is that anyone that casts a vote or agrees to the authority of government in a system where they are 'equal' partners in the participation of government, is part of the government. This eliminates the arcane notion of common men because now, everyone is an active participant in the violence its governing bodies are visiting on far-off nations. The act of voting makes one complicit in the acts those votes create in the government. 

The democratic governments still hold to the old idea of being a Nation and that Nation believes in distinctions between people, government agents, and military. Thus, when a bomb explodes and kills a convoy of soldiers it's not page one news. To the Nation state, it is simply a product of being at war: soldiers die at war. (read a citizen's view of being bombed in a place they believed would never be bombed: http://ww2today.com/25th-august-1940-berlin-bombed-for-the-first-time)

But, when a bomb goes off at a concert and kills what the Nation State still believes are 'citizens' suddenly there is moral outrage. The Nation States are so blinded by their Kantian value of reality, that they can't see that the enemies don't care about the Nation's views on power and the ethics of warfare. The enemy sees the so-called common man as part of the enemy. In fact, the common man is more important to the strategy of the enemy, because the common man votes and if the enemy can drive the citizen to vote to change something or drive him into not voting to change something he changes the Country by the act of fright. The enemy changes not simply a few interesting skirmish lines on some distant battlefield, but he changes the entire Nation State, right down to its methods of determining future realities. His acts of terror do the exact thing he designs them to do, by altering the logic, the underlying premise of existence the entity called Nation State defined itself as.

In Unification of Self, I point out that the vote is your consent to be ruled by the outcome of the vote. It is not, as most people believe it to be, a voice, but is simply consent to be ruled by the winners. What is worse, is that when measured against the wishes of rogue states and other Nation states, the vote is one's consent to be ruled by the outcome of every nation or agency of men calling themselves a nation. This is because the other nation states do not deal with the citizens, but with the citizen's ruling class. If one ruling class doesn't like the actions of the other ruling class, then the so-called voting populous finds themselves cannon fodder for the tyrannical ideals of their masters.

"But, Karry, they are terrorists killing women and children!"

I'm not arguing that. I'm indicating agreement, that violence is wrong.

But, if we consent that the notion of Nation owns the moral right to commit violence against any other group of people because it calls itself a Nation, because it has a flag, because it has land from which to launch its attacks, because it has a list of things it defines as its notion of itself - that would mean any group of men who simply called themselves a nation would gain the same authority and be allowed to use whatever means they had at their disposal to gain their desires; be that a congress of representatives or a group of tribal leaders operating from a cave.  

Of course, I can only hope that the reader realizes that such a group of agents calling themselves nations and committing violence as their method of controlling the means of production of men can only, ever go downward. There is no possible elevation in such a system. The large Nation States can pretend all they want to be moral and murder only other Nation State armies, but eventually, the Nation State simply makes the common man the army by conscripting him into its army. The Nation State doesn't even believe that the citizen is innocent. The Nation State willingly forces him to comply with its desire to wage war by forcing his means of production to move from personal survival to the notion of the Nation State's idea of self-sacrifice. Why should we be silly enough to expect a group of guys calling themselves a Nation respect the notion of a citizen when the so called leaders do not? Why should a logical means of self-ownership even consider a Nation State a valid answer when the Nation's sole purpose is to use the means of its subjects production to its own end? If our own leaders can throw us at their wars why is it immoral for a rogue state to bomb us in our homes? The underlying ethics of the Nation State is obviously broken. Any Nation State that can justify violence as a measure of its might is at the mercy of any other notion of State to use violence as its own measure of its might. Since we do not actually live in an evolved society, but still live under the cannon of arcane thought: then it should not surprise the reader that the idea of State is, and will always remain, the medieval notion that somehow Might makes things Right.

In the end, any agency of Nations believes it owns the authority to commit violence. The State says, "Who, how, where, and when are not any of the business of the common man." By the Nation state's opinion, the common man should sit down and shut up - and if need be, drafted into this government's affairs - if they don't like it, once every few years they have the perceived power to change it. But there is the rub because by that time fear or death has already destroyed logical truths about where the individual wishes their life to go. The direction of the individual man, his whole being, is controlled by the will of violence others can force on him. The Nation State, after all, creates the Ethics men must follow. Thus, nothing is solved by the vote, because the individual man is already in the system on the train as it were, where the stops are already predetermined and owned by the State. Voting is simply giving the passengers control over things that are on the train...not the train itself.

So we are left with only two simple options: 

Either 

We accept that any group of people calling themselves a Nation has the authority to use violence to justify itself and its means.

Or

We acknowledge that violence is an immoral method of achieving ownership over other people's means of production. Instead, we work toward a voluntary method of interaction.

It is either fear under the State or Liberty in the self.

Judging from the actions of men, it seems most people choose fear.